


having the space to know

by tempestshakes



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beth Lives, F/M, Slice of Life, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-09-26 05:38:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9868094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tempestshakes/pseuds/tempestshakes
Summary: There's this guy named Liam sniffing around Beth. Daryl doesn't really like it, and Beth doesn't really even care.





	1. Strawberry Chapstick

**Author's Note:**

> \+ title from “the mountain” by heartless bastards.  
> \+ usually i write this pairing very chaste oop (not that this will be explicit lmao...but maybe????)  
> \+ this will be maybe 5k total; we'll see.

When winter arrives, it dances in gently and with mercy for the living. The season slowly turns over, temperatures dropping bit by bit until the morning’s dew turns to frost. It eases Daryl’s anxieties about surviving the cold as he’s had time to prepare their settlement with the basics.

They’ve been smoking meats for weeks, gathering piles of firewood, creating knitted blankets out of old clothing scraps, and hauling all sorts of odds and ends from runs to nearby abandoned towns, nabbing the things that got picked over because they require a little more work and time to utilize. 

They possess that now—time. The woods are oddly silent of both the dead and the living, and there’s a sense of relief from many, but Daryl doesn’t let himself get too comfortable. Can’t. Comfort makes you slow, and slow makes you dead. 

That’s at least what Beth says to him while they whittle arrowheads on the porch of the house Beth shares with her sister and a few others. Daryl can feel her regard him as he works. Her gazes are level now. Not once has he _ever_ seen her look down her nose, but now she seldom watches him with her head tilted down, eyes peering up from beneath her eyelashes. These days…Beth meets his eyes with a gentle firmness and a bit something else he can’t put his finger on. A bit of laughter, maybe. Makes his stomach turn, and, shit, he swears he _doesn’t_ blush.  

Not that she’d be able to tell with his hair to his tops of his shoulders, lengthy and greased with the dirt and oils of apocalypse living (forget that indoor plumbing and hot showers are available) blocking his ruddy cheeks, the scruffy fuzz he calls a beard, and his chapped lips. Daryl wants to hide his face as adamantly as she presents hers. 

Wide sunburned nose, round blue eyes, a small rosy bow of a mouth, and sizable marks of experienced violence, Beth’s scars cut across her face, lovely prominent pink and white decorations, a declaration she seems to wear with pride. To Daryl, they tell a story of a survivor, a warrior, packaged as a slender young woman no one believed could last a one fuckin’ year into the end of the world. They were wrong. Goddamn, they were so fucking wrong.  

“Liam’s asking me to teach him how to hunt. Can you believe it?” 

He huffs a bit and smirks, “Naw—boy must be desperate for a teacher."

“Must be scared of you.”

“Good. People are gettin’ too friendly.”

Beth laughs a good laugh. “Can’t have that,” she says. 

“Nope.”

“ _Daryl,_ ” she chuckles, “you do know everyone here loves you. They think you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

That makes him look up and directly at her to see if she’s playing him for a fool, but her gaze is even as ever. 

“Everyone?” he asks _,_ but he ain’t angling. 

She purses her lips so they pucker and she looks adorable (not that he would _ever_ tell). Head tilting to the side so her ponytail swings over her shoulder and rests against the hill of her collarbone, Beth exhales noisily, probably annoyed at his ornery antisocial tendencies. 

“Ain’t no such thing as sliced bread no more, Greene.”

“It’s a saying _,_ Daryl.”

“Bunch of nonsense is what it is.”

“Hush your mouth,” she tells him, “I don’t want to hear your bull _shit_.”

It’s funny the way Beth swings from precious Southern belle, once a regular in the church youth group choir, to the woman the world’s shaped her to be—all at once a rose, but a rose with sharp thorns. What would Hershel think of her? Sweet Beth, the baby sister, the apple of her Daddy’s eye. Strong Beth, the sister that came back from the dead, the heat in Daryl’s veins. 

It’s true. She just comes into his line of sight and he’s warming all over. Her hands brush against his forearm and it’s engulfed in flames. She smiles and his whole stupid, ugly, old body burns. 

What the _fuck_?

* * *

Daryl’s blushing again for some reason. It’s her, she knows that much at least. Something about her makes him red as a good sunset, and it’s so goddamn cute.

Makes her uncomfortably aware of how her wet underwear feels in her jeans half the time she’s in his vicinity. Dirty and lustful. It wasn’t the way she imagined feeling after a man. In her younger dreams, her love for her beloved was always so chaste and pure, driven by fantasies of boys in cowboy boots riding horses across her daddy’s farm to take her hand in marriage and maybe sing her a song or two. Silly things. The sorts of details a good, virginal Christian girl would yearn for, except she’s not most of those things anymore. 

But with Daryl, while she still felt romantic about him, she also struggled with the deep desire to lick at the line of his neck and grab a handful of his crotch to just _feel_ that part of him that made her bite her bottom lip at night whilst driving two…three fingers deep inside her wet heat and curling them up _just so._

Lord, she wanted Daryl so badly she sometimes had half a mind to grab his meaty hands and stuff them inside her jeans herself, just so he could feel, he could understand and have irrefutable proof that she longed for him as painfully as she sometimes suspected he longed for her 

But…she wasn’t certain. Damn it. The lurking chance that he felt only friendship for her never left her alone, but her resolve was weakening, and Beth knew her truth would be exposed soon. 

“I got you somethin’,” Daryl suddenly says, interrupting her unclean thoughts. He’s fiddling with the little leather pouch he wears tied to his belt. 

Curiosity nips at her gut and she feels stupid butterflies swirling around in her stomach. “What? When?" 

“Last week. When we went on the run to that general store.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know it.”

Beth ditches any pretense of working on her arrowhead and leans back against the whitewashed wooden pillar, and feels the old paint crackle and fall against her jacket. “Daryl…” she says slowly towards the front lawn, “…if you keep bringin’ me gifts, folks are gonna think you’re sweet on me." 

She can’t bear to face him, not when she’s toying with him so mercilessly. Any other man would welcome old-fashioned flirtation, prepared to show off his charm, but Daryl isn’t other men, and Beth is acutely aware of that. He’s easy to tease, easy to embarrass, easy to offend. He’s…sensitive. She can hear his defensive snapping, _I ain’t sweet on nothing!_

But. He doesn’t snarl. 

Daryl says, “Let’m think it.”

Her breath catches. When she finally finds her composure, Beth turns to him and holds out her palm. “Alright. Let’s see it then.”

His eye contact is ferocious, hooded gaze glinting, a smile playing at the secretive corners of his mouth, and Beth thinks he’s more handsome today than he was yesterday. Nothing happens for what must be a minute. Her fingers tingle through her gloves. 

Shrugging, Daryl loosens the opening of the pouch and reaches inside with his index and middle fingers. He pulls out a thin plastic cylinder with a shiny, colorful label. Chapstick.  

He twiddles it like an unlit cigarette before popping the cap off with his thumb. The pink balm that twirls up is smooth and unused, and Beth’s panties are once again in their excited state as the object of all her wholesome and filthy affections slides the balm across his lips. His tongue slip out to get a taste, and he just says, “Strawberry,” like he hasn’t just made her heart stop. 

“My favorite,” she breathes out and beams too brightly for a sunless, gloomy day.

And then Daryl’s shifting uneasy in his seat, rucking up the lapel of his jacket and tucking his chin into the shearling collar. He snaps the cap back on the lip balm and tosses it at her with barely even a glance. A dark look passes over his brow but the damage is done. She _knows._ He must feel similarly to her—he _must._

Right?


	2. After Family Dinner

Rick serves dinner to the group that night, dancing around Michonne in their kitchen, as happy as Daryl’s ever seen him. Beth rests her head against his shoulder when they polish off the food and sighs. Once upon a time, he might have quickly checked to see everyones' reactions to such a blatant display of affection, but he’s seen the way their family lets them be after a few knowing looks. No one ever dares to comment on the unusual pair they make. 

Carl pulls out a card deck, and Tara, Rosita, and Glenn join him for a game of gin rummy by the fire. Carol brushes out and braids Maggie’s hair on the floor of living room beside them. 

“Beth,” Maggie calls, “Liam asked about you today.”

Beth smiles slightly. “What’d he say?” Daryl finds he isn’t particularly interested in what Liam had to say.

“He wanted to know if you knew anything about medicinal herbs. He's been having trouble with some of his personal crop.” 

“He should ask Carla,” says Tara from her spot. “She used to be a landscape designer.”

“Fuck is that?” Daryl mutters, and Beth pokes his side. 

Glenn picks up a new card and says, “Tara just thinks Carla’s the shit ‘cause she’s hot.” Maggie kicks at the back of his head best she can from where she’s seated, eyebrows raised. “I said Tara thinks she’s not hot!” he yelps. “I don’t think she’s hot. She’s not hot. Her…breast area…is way, way too…large.”

“Yeah, that’s what most men say about women they don’t find attractive—their boobs are too big,” Rosita drawls. Next to her Carl tries valiantly not look down Rosita’s scoop-necked top. 

“I’m just saying! I don’t think—shit. I’m done with this conversation.” Glenn shakes his head, defeated. 

The ladies and Daryl are amused, but Beth’s gone too still. She’s scratching at the scar on her cheek, dirt still embedded beneath her painted nail, visible where the mint green hue’s chipped. Another one of his gifts. The nail polish, not the dirt. 

“Whatcha thinkin’?” Daryl drawls against her temple. His breaths stirs the fine baby hairs. 

Springing back to life, Beth jiggles her knees, knocking them together and against his thighs. She looks a bit feverish. “Oh, nothin’,” she says hastily.

“Don’t look like nothin’.”

“Nothing important,” Beth amends and tilts her face up to show a trying smile. 

“Greene…spit it out,” Daryl says. No one watches them; they're either engrossed in what’s turning out to be a devilish game of cards, or paired off and in their own conversation. 

“It’s just…what they were all sayin’—I mean…nevermind. It’s stupid.”

“Fuck that.”

“Fuck you.”

Daryl pinches the fleshy lobe of her ear. She swats away his hand, but he comes at her again, this time ticking at neck, and Beth throws her head back, giggling, trying to catch his hands in hers and failing. In the distance, Carl crows; he must think he’s winning. 

“Pretty sure good girls don’t speak that kinda language,” Daryl hedges.

A fair eyebrow pops up, fingers come up to pull at his beard, and Beth leans in just a hair to whisper, “Then I guess I’m not a good girl”

_Fuck_. 

* * *

“So Beth, do you think you’re going to help Liam?” Maggie’s head is tilted back as Carol tugs to make the french braid tight, but Beth doesn’t miss the glint in her eye, a sparkle pronounced by the firelight. Her sister’s playing some game with this conversation, toying with her baby sister the way she hasn’t since their Daddy died, since she gave up looking for a sister that was surely dead when the prison fell. 

Beth answers carefully, not even moving from her spot by Daryl’s firm shoulder even if her hand does fall away from his scruffy chin. He smells of leather, a tinge of sweat, and the sharpness of winter dirt—maybe not every woman’s preferred scent, but it’s _Daryl_. And okay, also she’s a bit flustered because she’s just said something unflinchingly provocative to Daryl’s _face,_ and he hasn’t stopped staring with this indescribable _look._ Lord, have mercy. 

“Well, I don’t know much. Daryl—,” Daryl slightly shifts,“—or Carol probably can help more than I can, but I’ll look into it.”

“Alright. Is he still asking you if you’ll teach him how to hunt—”

“Yeah.”

“You gonna—“

“Probably not.”

“Geez, someone’s grumpy.”

“Maggie,” Beth mock-whispers, “Daryl doesn’t like it when people talk about him like that.” 

The man snorts. She can feel it on her collar; the nerves pulse in time with her heart. Her chest is probably a rash of red. 

“Liam’s grown into himself, don’tcha think, Bethy?” Maggie says with her tongue ending caught between her teeth in an almost grin.

Beth- _y_ is trying her goddamn hardest not to startle Daryl out of whatever mood he’s in as the backs of his fingers slide against her outer thigh, the one that she’d knocked against him and stayed glued to his warmth, so his hand is hidden between their bodies. Over and over, a caress that burns through her jeans. She can feel the drag of his knuckles, his pinky fingering the side seam during a pause. 

He’s…gotta be…aware. Knowing. Of what this does to her. 

She was bold and now he’s matching her. 

It’s Carl that speaks. “Beth? You like Liam?” His puppy-love for her may have faded a time back, but it flares up every now and then. 

Daryl rubs the pad of his thumb against her and pushes in a bit. Not enough to bruise, but enough pressure to ghost pain, a taste of his strength. 

“He’s alright,” she says. Her voice is slightly breathy and _maybe_ the other’s hear it as a possibly hidden crush. They’ll hear the blushing, virginal Beth Greene of the farm because sometimes the scarred and meditative version of her is an unknown sum of experiences they abandoned her to. It will comfort them that possibly there’s a somewhat normal boy she’s interested in.

Meanwhile, the reason she’s finding it so hard to keep a steady voice is withdrawing his hand. She can see him in her periphery grasp it in his other palm, fingertips fluttering over his scabby knuckles, hunching his back a tad and bringing the hands up to his face where he gently prods at the corner of his mouth with his thumb. A wet sliver of his tongue just barely swipes at it and he hums. 

He didn’t even really touch her and he’s humming at the imagined taste.

“Yeah, he’s alright,” she repeats. _He’s no Daryl Dixon._

Maggie shrugs sleepily while Carol smooths down her braid with a loving affection. Rosita almost knocks over Tara’s tea with her foot, but no one pays any attention because it turns out Glenn might’ve been cheating the whole game.

Rick humming floats down the stairs. He sings to Michonne sometimes, and though his voice isn’t all that great, Beth thinks it sounds as good as any love song from before. It makes her happy. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank y'all for your comments and kudos! i'm happy you've liked it so far.


	3. Childers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \+ listening to a lot of Tyler Childers' music while writing this, so that's where Liam's last name comes from. I heavily recommend "Charleston Girl", "White House Road", and "Follow You to Virgie" from the Live at Red Barn Radio recordings on Spotify. SO GOOD.

When the group first arrived, Liam Childers was all arms and legs, a gangly young man with a classicallyhandsome profile. Over the months, Liam grew into himself, building musculature to match his tall body, and a personality to match. He was quick to smile, easy to make laugh, and always had a clever quip for every conversation. Almost all the single woman under the age of 40 on the compound had a growing crush on the man, and he was regularly pulled into conversations about the weather, or the crops, or any old thing just to capture his attentions for an hour. 

Local desired man was a role Daryl fills every now and then before his gruff disposition turned his admirers off, and thank fuck for that because there was nothing more mortifying than Carla from the west neighborhood stroking his sweaty bicep, or Gina, the former dance instructor, purposefully undoing the top button of her blouse whilst tending to their cold-vegetable garden as he tied together chicken wire in front of her. Gina’s bosom went unnoticed until Rick walked up behind him and made a choking noise that morphed into a soft chuckle.

“Nothing gets past you, huh, Dixon?” Rick claps him on the back smirking. Daryl’s eyebrows shoot up, and Rick tips his head nonchalantly toward the cabbage row where Gina’s arching her back a bit too much to just be pulling weeds. 

Daryl’s tongue turns to sand in his mouth and he feel his whole face heat up. It’s like when he was in his twenties and he entered any bar with Merle. There was the teasing and raucous hollering Daryl was forced to weather whenever a pair of tits or a round ass was completely disregarded by the younger Dixon. Ole’ Merle never understood his perceived sexless baby brother and took every opportunity to shove some poor woman into his terrified arms. And while he knew the basic workings of a lady’s body, Daryl never took much care to make sex more than a couple thrusts and maybe hasty orgasm if someone was lucky.

He feels even more turned about because the reason he didn’t see Gina’s display was because he’d been surreptitiously watching Beth. Yellow grasses spun into her hair by children, arms brown with soil, and a small stretch of back exposed over her jeans, slick with perspiration and dimpled right above her ass, Beth was unaware of what distraction she was for him. 

“Maybe go talk to her?” Rick says with his tongue trapped between his white teeth, mocking. 

Daryl grunts and clips the last bit of fencing. 

“She’s checking you out, man.” 

“Shut the fuck up, _Sheriff,_ ” Daryl snarls. In the corner of his eye, he sees Beth stand up and stretch, hands molded against her slender hips. He wants to hear her little groan of pleasure when the bones in her back pop, but Rick’s breathing too damn loud. 

Rick moves so his back towards the garden and crosses his arms over his chest. “Looks like you're interested in someone else…”

Daryl rolls his shoulders, but doesn’t say a thing. Beth’s busy chatting it up with Gina. Her hands fiddle with a lip balm, the strawberry flavor he gifted her, the same balm he used so stupidly on his own lips just to make her squirm because she’d been looking at him with a secretive sparkle in her eye, and it unnerved him. 

“You know, Dixon, it ain’t my place to be saying anything, but…,” the Sheriff takes a millisecond to glance back at the younger Greene sister as if considering his next words, “…you’re not the only one interested.”

The pliers slam to the ground. “You know who?”

“Yup.”

Rick doesn’t breath another word and simply looks around the neighborhood with a puffed up chest, arrogant with tittle-tattle.

“Well…,” Daryl prompts as Liam makes his way to the group with four plastic milk cartons full of homemade liquid fertilizer.

“Come on, man…you really don’t know?” With thumbs tucked into his belt loops, Rick rolls his eyes and shuffles his feet a moment, finally murmuring, “Childers.”

Daryl almost get whiplash from how fast his head jerks up. Maybe his eyes go a bit wild, he doesn’t fucking know, but Rick starts chuckling again at whatever emotion he’s displaying. 

“Ya’ll are working too hard. Beth, are your knees feeling alright today?” Daryl hears Liam ask.

“Yes. Thank you for asking, Liam.”

“Does that mean you’ll come over for dinner tonight?”

_This fucker,_ thinks Daryl with an acute pain he doesn’t quite know the source of piercing his chest.

Beth isn’t saying anything, and Rick’s roughly racking his hand through his hair like he’s stressed, and fuck if he knows what Gina’s doing with her top half undone in the wintertime, mild weather or not.

Finally, Beth says, “Daryl and I are in charge of dinner for our house tonight. Sorry! Maybe another time?”

Daryl feels his limbs freeze, not even hearing how Liam is answering because Beth just lied. Told a straight up whopper. She never cooks, and no one ever dared let Daryl in the kitchen because the only spice he knew was salt, and the only temperature he used was hot-as-fuck to burn the shit out of chunks of animal flesh. Chefs, they were not.

Liam shows his teeth and whistles. “That’s too bad. Maybe another night then?”

“Greene!” Daryl shouts before he even really thinks about what he’s doing. “Quit yer dawdlin’!”

She swivels around and eyes him like he’s nuts. 

“Quit your a yellin’!”

At the same moment, Liam says, “Hey Dixon!” and motherfucker adds a friendly waves. Screw him. 

“Childers,” Daryl all but growls. 

“Smooth,” Rick murmurs, mouth tilted down towards his shoulder so the rest of their company can’t read his lips. 

“ _Shut_ it.”

His buddy doesn’t stop his chortles, and Beth’s saying something else to Childers and twirling a piece of her golden hair around a finger. Daryl finds the action maddening for some reason.

“I swear to God, Grimes, I’mma let yer woman know who exactly stuffed his gut with her stash of chocolates.”

Rick pales beneath the layer of filth on his face. With a loud, wet sniff, Rick pulls his shoulders back and nods like he’s made an important decision about stuff and things. He walks briskly away. “Alrighty then.”

“Arighty.”

Then, Beth giggles like she usually does, all high and sweet, and Childers is visibly into it—Daryl can tell, plain as fuckin’ day. What the _fuck_. When? Well, yeah, okay, so he knew that Liam’d been sniffing around Beth, asking her to teach him all kinds of shit, and inquiring about her interests, and inviting her to lunch some days, but Jesus Christ, he’d thought… _fuck_. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. 

Daryl anxiously glances at the pair again; his discomfort must be obvious as geek guts on a white shirt because he hears Rick a few feet away call out, in true brotherly fashion, “Yo, _Romeo_ , eat shit!”

* * *

 


End file.
